Latest Posts

Column 14: The Heart-Pounding Intensity of The Knick

October 22, 2014

The Knick is the best show currently airing on TV. Well, after its season finale this past Friday, it’s technically on hiatus until 2015, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a frenetically pulsating beam of television magic in an otherwise dull fall season. The show is truly a gritty, debris-covered gem mined from the depths of Steven Soderbergh’s directorial genius, making it the quintessence of the argument that television has surpassed the cinema in every way you can imagine. If one of the ways you’ve imagined happens to be the show’s music, then you’re absolutely right. Scored by Cliff Martinez (a frequent Soderbergh collaborator), the music’s electrified synthesizers and intense baselines wallop you out of the turn-of-the-century and transport you into some sort of 1980s control room where a drugged-up computer scientist is turning dials and hitting buttons with such fervor that you feel as if you’re[...]

Column 10: Zach Braff Swings for Another Home Run with Wish I Was Here Soundtrack

July 16, 2014

Do you remember the stir Zach Braff created last April when he launched a Kickstarter campaign to finance his next movie? People were very divided on the issue; some threw their money at their favorite former Scrubs/movie star, while others resented what the perceived to be an A-lister trying to milk laypeople of their hard-earned money. Regardless of how you felt, the Kickstarter campaign was a success and Braff’s movie, Wish I Was Here, is coming out on Friday. The soundtrack debuted yesterday, and it’s getting a fair amount of attention thanks to Braff’s soundtrack track record (cough, Garden State, cough). His 2004 efforts were everything that “lightening-in-a-bottle” phrase intends to describe, and Braff had a lot to live up to this time around. In his press rounds this month, Braff has shared some anecdotes about the soundtrack, the most intriguing being that he tapped several artists to write original[...]

Column 2: Let’s Talk About TURN

May 7, 2014

AMC has an impressive track record of successful television programming. Its standouts, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, quite often are referred to as the best shows in the history of television. Anyone who’s watched them knows this to be true. But for every Jaguar pitch and jaw-dropping desert shootout, there are a handful of mediocre moments happening on one of AMC’s lesser shows. TURN, AMC’s new colonial spy drama, is just slightly better than mediocre despite an obvious attempt to be great.  TURN’s mediocrity is surprising because it has all the makings of a successful show: a story with a good hook, unknown actors, attractive costuming and set design, purposeful music, and the list goes on. It’s as if the programming team at AMC looked at their successes and from them created a checklist of what every other show must have in order to be good. This line of thinking seems[...]